Signs of a hacked website
- Redirects to gambling, pharmacy or adult sites
- Pages or links you never created
- A “dangerous site” warning in Google or in the browser
- A host that suspends the site or reports mass email sending
- An unknown administrator account
What to do right away
- Do not delete anything: the infected files are used to find the flaw.
- Change the password of your hosting account and your email.
- Write to me with the website address and what you see.
Why websites get hacked
In the vast majority of cases: an outdated plugin or module, an abandoned theme, or a password that is too weak. Hackers are not targeting your site in particular: bots automatically test thousands of sites looking for a known flaw.
A real example
The WordPress site of Parismatic Tour, hacked and redirected to other sites, was cleaned and put back online in 2 days, then replaced by a custom site on a secure server: no new intrusion since.
Stopping it from happening again
A cleaned site left without updates will be hacked again. Maintenance takes care of that from €49 excl. VAT per month: updates, backups, monitoring and security scans.
Let us be honest: no website is 100% secure. The protections I put in place (updates, firewall, strong passwords, monitoring) discourage the vast majority of attacks, which are automated and aim at poorly maintained sites. But a determined hacker who targets your site specifically can always end up finding a flaw. The goal is therefore twofold: make the attack difficult, and be able to put the site back online quickly thanks to backups if it succeeds.
